Apparently search engines are using subtle tactics in the War Against Boys. I'm going to email Christina Hoff Sommers about this obfuscation tactic, since she is working on a 2nd edition of her seminal book. Google the terms (without quotes) foster boys percent and look through the first ten results. Only one of the ten results actually shows the word boys in bold type in the snippet. The rest show the word kids in bold type, an alternative search term that was obviously set by someone at Google and not specified in my search query. To prove this is the case, just search foster girls percent and you'll see that kids is not a substitute term for girls. Only the word girls is in bold type in those results, not kids.
The only motivation I see for this subtle but nefarious search algorithm is that Google has a feminist agenda (like Wikipedia) and feels that searching for anything regarding boys' issues or topics is verboten. Girls must always be included even when trying to do something just for boys. (eg, Big Brothers organization is now Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Boys Clubs of America is now Boys & Girls Clubs, YMCA is now officially called the Y).
I first noticed this Google algorithm when searching for martial arts classes for my son to see if there are any classes just for boys. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, combing through the hundreds of results that only mentioned kids karate, which I think is Google's objective. They wouldn't be so brazen as to not give any results with the search term boy, so they'll just bury those results with the gender neutral term and make the information harder to find. As a side note, I noticed that below a certain age, you can find plenty of sports classes just for girls, but almost none just for boys.
Today's news story about Rick Santorum vs Google has a quote that is now clearly disingenuous: "Google's search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web," says spokesman Gabriel Stricker. The Google spokesman says it is not their problem to fix the pornographic search results that come up with Rick Santorum's name, results that were rigged by a gay activist, but Google will clearly go out of their way to rig results themselves to obfuscate any searches for boys topics.
